“DEEP IN THE MESS OF THINGS”
by Henri Cole
There is no poet who sounds like John Berryman in his 77 Dream Songs . He is an underground poet who made up a new kind of poem. In 1965, when he was fifty, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this daring sequence, and just seven years later, in Minneapolis, he jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge onto the ice of the MississippiRiver.
Berryman belonged to the new generation of poets emerging in the 1940s that included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. Like his predecessors, he wrote skillful, intelligent poems, but he no longer felt adherent to T. S. Eliot’s cult of impersonality. Instead, his poems dealt with experience often at the edge of disintegration and breakdown. In 77 DreamSongs , Berryman discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax in a caudate sonnet of three six-line stanzas. His protagonist, Henry, stumbles along through life, a kind of antihero or front man, who, according to Berryman, both is and isn’t him. “We touch at certain points,” he explained. “But I am an actual human being; he [Henry] is nothing but a series ofconceptions—my conceptions.” Still, like Berryman, who suffered from alcoholism and depression, Henry is troubled, vulnerable, vehement, libidinous—and he is a white American in early middle age living at some outer boundary where the soul is in crisis. You might say that the speaker of the Dream Songs, Henry, is a modern day Saint Augustine—a writer of particular interest to Berryman—who talks abouthimself in the first, second, and third person. “Henry has a hard time. People don’t like him, and he doesn’t seem to like himself,” Berryman said about Henry. Sometimes he doesn’t even know his name: he’s either Henry or he’s Henry Pussy-cat or he’s Henry House. Sometimes the poems are dialogues with an unnamed friend who calls him Mr. Bones, though Berryman would put quotation marks around friend , “because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived,” who keeps questioning the author and speaking for him.
John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in Oklahoma in 1914, and brought up a strict Roman Catholic in the small town of Anadarko. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Tampa, Florida, where in 1926 his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., killed himself. Inher sympathetic memoir Poets in Their Youth , Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, writes, “John had felt a compulsion to go in search of his father’s ghost, a search which, though he wasn’t consciously aware of it, would lead him to a new poetic subject and The Dream Songs .” In Dream Song #42, Henry asks his dead father to remember him:
O journeyer, deaf in the mould, insane
with violenttravel & death: consider me
in my cast, your first son.
Soon after being widowed, the poet’s mother married a banker named John Berryman, and her son took his surname before attending boarding school in Connecticut. Later, at Columbia University, he studied with the literary scholar Mark Van Doren, who is credited with sparking Berryman’s serious interest in writing poetry.
Berryman’s classmateRobert Giroux was a quiet, passionate literary man who would eventually become his editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; while they were still students in the 1930s, Giroux published Berryman’s first poems in the college literary magazine. In an interview for The Paris Review , Giroux says that Berryman’s mother caused her son to have difficulties greater than his illness. He calls her “a campusmother who haunted him daily, from his undergraduate days at John Jay Hall to his wintertime suicide in Minneapolis in 1972.” She was so theatrical that when she phoned Giroux with the news of her son’s death, instead of reporting straightaway that he’d killed himself, she said, “Bob, John has gone in under the water.” Giroux didn’t at
by Henri Cole
There is no poet who sounds like John Berryman in his 77 Dream Songs . He is an underground poet who made up a new kind of poem. In 1965, when he was fifty, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this daring sequence, and just seven years later, in Minneapolis, he jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge onto the ice of the MississippiRiver.
Berryman belonged to the new generation of poets emerging in the 1940s that included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and Delmore Schwartz. Like his predecessors, he wrote skillful, intelligent poems, but he no longer felt adherent to T. S. Eliot’s cult of impersonality. Instead, his poems dealt with experience often at the edge of disintegration and breakdown. In 77 DreamSongs , Berryman discovered a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax in a caudate sonnet of three six-line stanzas. His protagonist, Henry, stumbles along through life, a kind of antihero or front man, who, according to Berryman, both is and isn’t him. “We touch at certain points,” he explained. “But I am an actual human being; he [Henry] is nothing but a series ofconceptions—my conceptions.” Still, like Berryman, who suffered from alcoholism and depression, Henry is troubled, vulnerable, vehement, libidinous—and he is a white American in early middle age living at some outer boundary where the soul is in crisis. You might say that the speaker of the Dream Songs, Henry, is a modern day Saint Augustine—a writer of particular interest to Berryman—who talks abouthimself in the first, second, and third person. “Henry has a hard time. People don’t like him, and he doesn’t seem to like himself,” Berryman said about Henry. Sometimes he doesn’t even know his name: he’s either Henry or he’s Henry Pussy-cat or he’s Henry House. Sometimes the poems are dialogues with an unnamed friend who calls him Mr. Bones, though Berryman would put quotation marks around friend , “because this is one of the most hostile friends who ever lived,” who keeps questioning the author and speaking for him.
John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in Oklahoma in 1914, and brought up a strict Roman Catholic in the small town of Anadarko. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Tampa, Florida, where in 1926 his father, John Allyn Smith, Sr., killed himself. Inher sympathetic memoir Poets in Their Youth , Eileen Simpson, Berryman’s first wife, writes, “John had felt a compulsion to go in search of his father’s ghost, a search which, though he wasn’t consciously aware of it, would lead him to a new poetic subject and The Dream Songs .” In Dream Song #42, Henry asks his dead father to remember him:
O journeyer, deaf in the mould, insane
with violenttravel & death: consider me
in my cast, your first son.
Soon after being widowed, the poet’s mother married a banker named John Berryman, and her son took his surname before attending boarding school in Connecticut. Later, at Columbia University, he studied with the literary scholar Mark Van Doren, who is credited with sparking Berryman’s serious interest in writing poetry.
Berryman’s classmateRobert Giroux was a quiet, passionate literary man who would eventually become his editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; while they were still students in the 1930s, Giroux published Berryman’s first poems in the college literary magazine. In an interview for The Paris Review , Giroux says that Berryman’s mother caused her son to have difficulties greater than his illness. He calls her “a campusmother who haunted him daily, from his undergraduate days at John Jay Hall to his wintertime suicide in Minneapolis in 1972.” She was so theatrical that when she phoned Giroux with the news of her son’s death, instead of reporting straightaway that he’d killed himself, she said, “Bob, John has gone in under the water.” Giroux didn’t at
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